


Thestralskin

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Advent Fics 2017 [13]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Angst, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Incest, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:51:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: Draco discovers his father, a powerful Lord, wishes to marry him after his mother’s death. He flees to the ruins of a castle with a forest full of shadows next to it, a small herd of thestrals roaming the ruins…and a mysterious green-eyed boy who comes to fly his broom over it. Based on the fairytale “Donkeyskin.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of my Advent fics, and pretty AU in several ways that will be revealed as the story goes on. Please don’t read this if you’re sensitive to scenes of attempted non-con.

**Title:** Thestralskin  
**Disclaimer:** J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.  
**Pairing:** Harry/Draco, one-sided Lucius/Draco, past Lucius/Narcissa, James/Lily  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Content Notes:** Incest, attempted rape, minor character death, massive AU, fairytale AU  
**Wordcount:** This part 5100  
**Summary:** Draco discovers his father, a powerful Lord, wishes to marry him after his mother’s death. He flees to the ruins of a castle with a forest full of shadows next to it, a small herd of thestrals roaming the ruins…and a mysterious green-eyed boy who comes to fly his broom over it. Based on the fairytale “Donkeyskin.”  
**Author’s Notes:** This is one of my Advent fics, and pretty AU in several ways that will be revealed as the story goes on. Please don’t read this if you’re sensitive to scenes of attempted non-con.

**Thestralskin**

There was a boy, once, who had hair like gold and eyes like silver, and a heart like coolest jade.

He lived in a lordly manor, the boy did. He had two parents who both loved him very much. The woman had eyes like silver, too, and hair like the blaze of an icicle when the sun shines through it, very early in the morning. The man had eyes and hair both of silver.

And though they loved the boy, perhaps it would be more accurate to say they loved each other more. The woman’s wisdom and beauty were the husband’s treasures. He would spend hours in her bedroom doing nothing but brushing her hair, marveling at the silken trailing of it across his hands. She would look at him in the mirror and smile.

Nor was the woman less in love with her husband. They would walk together through the gardens, and their laughter would ring out among the roses, and the boy would look up from his studies—in numbers and letters and curses and beasts and plants—and wonder.

They never laughed like that around him.

*

Through eight summers and nine winters the boy lived in the manor, and knew his parents as smiling shadows. But then he woke one morning when the spring sunlight was pouring through the windows, and saw his father standing next to his bed with a pale face.

“Get up.”

The boy stood and moved towards his father, wondering what was wrong. He had often seen his father look like metal, but never like marble.

The father pushed down with his hands on the boy’s shoulders, and the boy winced. Perhaps the father was sorry for that later. It is not a thing that can be known.

But right then, he was not sorry. He said, “Your mother’s going, Draco.”

Draco was bewildered. Just as he himself did not leave the manor for the wild lands that lay beyond, neither did his mother. Their bargain with the fey brought them all they needed, jars of sparkling cool milk and plates of fresh biscuits and shining robes and all the rest of it, to their front stoop. The furthest Draco had ever gone from the manor was to walk around the garden brimming with white peacocks.

“Where is she going?” he asked, as was natural for a boy so young and sheltered.

For a moment, his father’s hands grew heavier. Then he said, “She’s dying.”

“But how?” Draco was young enough that he didn’t really understand death, although now and then a peacock egg failed to hatch, and sometimes a stalking wild cat leaped over the walls and killed a bird. “Did she go outside and get hurt by a cat?”

“No. She’s dying of a very dreadful and terrible thing that burned her magic up from the inside.” Father’s hands grew heavier. “And you must come and see her.”

Draco shrank at that. He was a very little boy, he was more sheltered than he knew, and he no more understood this new thing shattering his peace than the peacocks understood when they ended their lives beneath quick claws. “Do I have to? I don’t want to!”

“You _must_.”

That was the first time the father had ever been so harsh with his son. Draco stumbled, weeping, in front of Father, and stopped in front of the massive door that he had only seen once or twice. That had been when he visited his mother in the morning so she could give him a few lessons on braiding a woman’s hair. But Father always took over those lessons and shooed him out.

Now the massive door, carved with delicate stepping deer that had long necks and blue jewels for eyes, opened, and Father drew Draco irresistibly into the room to see what lay on the bed.

It did not look like Mother. That comforted Draco in some depth of his soul that he couldn’t speak at his age. He trod softly nearer and stared. The being on the bed wasn’t even Mother’s height. It was small, and pale, and twisted as if with age, fingers clasped around something made of stone in its hands. The hair was withered and so pale that it looked white. Draco leaned nearer to see what it was holding.

It was a pendant, he realized. A glittering sapphire sunrise in a setting of gold, with marble backing it. Mother always said that was so it was a durable sunrise, and could never be destroyed.

Mother never took it off.

Draco sobbed and stumbled back from the bed as the figure took a rattling breath. Father caught him and shoved him forwards again, but Draco wouldn’t go. It was suddenly real, and the small pale thing on the bed _was_ Mother after all, because she would never have taken her necklace off.

“You must look. These are her final moments.”

“I’m not looking! I hate it!”

And Draco, just after he witnessed his mother’s last breath, tore free and ran out of the room, into the gardens, where the peacocks stalked back and forth, tails spread. Draco sat and watched them, trying to make out the pale blue eyes on their shining white feathers. He watched and watched, and had almost forgotten when Father came up beside him and dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“We must be all in all to each other, now that your mother is gone.”

Draco said nothing. He bowed his head and let his pale hair fall around his face, while his finger picked at a stick that was lying at his feet.

Father actually let him sit there and grieve for longer than Draco had thought he would. This only proved he didn’t understand his father yet. And at last he did have to rise and go back into the house, and learn the spells that would prepare a body for burial. Father said he would someday have to bury his own spouse and perhaps even his children.

He gave Draco a hard look when he spoke about the “spouse.” Draco didn’t notice.

*

As he grew older, Draco learned. But he did not learn perhaps the most vital thing of all, how to read his father.

He only knew that Father had meant it when he said they had to be all in all to each other now that Mother was gone, and that was reassuring in an odd way. Now he was learning many more things than he ever had when they were together, his parents, and banished him to his bedroom to play or read. He learned curses and hexes, the ways of magical creatures, the proud history of the Malfoy family, the reasons that pure blood mattered.

He learned the history of the disastrous last war, when the hero Lord Voldemort had led an uprising against the crushing, stifling Light that wanted to destroy the soft, welcoming Darkness. He had confronted the epitome of that “Light” on the grounds of the greatest wizarding school to ever exist, Hogwarts. If he could take Hogwarts, then he would make it a center of Darkness and teach the others in their world the embrace of the shadows and how to overcome the poor humans who were not wizards.

But something had gone wrong. That was all Draco could find in the phrasing of it, which was straight from Father’s own lips; all of his history books were older than that and didn’t discuss the war. Dumbledore, the old Light Lord, had prepared some kind of trap, and when Lord Voldemort struck the victorious blow, that trap sprang.

“Fueled by an old man’s treachery,” Father said, staring out into the garden where the peacocks pranced. “The fool could never stand to lose.”

It was such a wondrous thing to Draco, that his Father had actually _known_ the heroic Dark Lord and the dastardly Light Lord. It all seemed like ancient history to him, sitting there among the flowers, in the brightness.

Father looked aside and told him the rest of the tale in a hushed, horrified voice. How the magic of the Light spread out from the castle, scalding and burning all those who had followed the Dark Lord. But the Darkness itself had risen, as wild magic from the earth, and it had smothered, as it ran, those who had their allegiance to the Light. In the end, only those who could wield both kinds of magic, and those creatures who were beyond either, had survived. Many Dark wizards had died that day, and Hogwarts school and the village of Hogsmeade were in ruins. The rest of the magical world had been burned by similar fires, and had decayed quickly.

If Father and Mother hadn’t already been married, Draco would probably never have been born. They weren’t about to venture out into the burning world for anything. Their house-elves went for them when they had to have something that didn’t grow in their gardens or couldn’t be made by the clever hands of the fey they bargained with.

But then Father told Draco that _he_ would have to have a spouse someday. Draco cowered and said the first thing that came to mind. Because there was one world of stories and that was fine, he loved stories, but he didn’t want it to intrude into the world of reality.

“Father, how _can_ I? You couldn’t do it, and you’re an adult wizard and a lot more experienced than me!”

Father gave him a slight smile that Draco didn’t understand. His eyes were distant and bright, and for a minute Draco thought there was a fire burning in the garden and throwing red shadows on his face. Then he blinked and the moment was gone. There were never fires in the gardens except sometimes in autumn when the elves burned dead leaves and flowers.

“You will understand when the time to secure a spouse comes,” Father said, and would say no more.

Draco knew, later, that he should have questioned that silence.

*

Years passed, and Draco grew. He knew he would soon arrive at the age of seventeen, which meant that he would assume the proper mantle of Malfoy heirship that was denied him now. He already had a wand, chosen from a store of ancestors’ wands. Lucius had told him to take the one that bonded with him best.

In the end, Draco thought, he had picked the one that felt the least irritated to be chosen by someone else. But he could cast powerful curses and hexes with it, and defend himself against the opponents his father’s magic conjured, and although he didn’t at _all_ like the thought of going into battle, he knew he could get far enough away in enough time to Apparate. Father had taught him how to Apparate when he was twelve.

Sometimes Draco sat in the gardens and looked at the towering walls of white stone. Father had shown him old diagrams of the Manor that said they used to be lower, once upon a time, but Father had raised them higher with blood magic when the fires broke out.

It occurred to Draco that he had never wondered what was beyond them. He had no desire to travel the world like the heroes in some of his favorite wizarding tales.

But Draco only shrugged when he realized that. He would have liked to see some things, but they were all in ruins. And he had _no_ desire for battle. Why not remain in Malfoy Manor and have a pleasant rest of his life?

*

“It is time for you to take a spouse.”

Draco started and looked up. He was wearing a soft crown of woven peacock feathers on his head, hanging down from the silver circlet that Father had presented him with for his seventeenth birthday. Draco thought it an odd gift, even with all he had read about ancient customs for coming of age when the wizarding world was still intact.

He had no idea how odd. But then, he had never seen anything odd in the way Father’s gaze lingered over him, either.

“How can I do that if I can’t leave the Manor, Father?” Draco asked, and then a thought occurred to him. There were still scrying bowls that his ancestors had used, gleaming silver basins trembling with a liquid that was not water, fastened to the pedestals in the upper corridors. Draco had no gift for the Sight, but he knew Father could pass them and they would tremble. “Are you going to scry for a spouse for me, Father?”

“I did last night. And the water told me what I already knew.”

“Shall I have to go on a quest for a bride?” Draco was still young enough to be excited by the idea of quests. Young wizards and witches often are.

“You shall not.” Father’s gaze was as straight and cold as an icicle. “You shall wed me.”

And Draco paused. Because in all the cloudy romances he had read of the wonders of the wizarding world before the fallen age that they were living in, he had never once read of a father wedding a son. Mothers and fathers wedded each other. They had children. The children grew up and perhaps they lived in the same place as their parents, but they never _married_ one of them.

“You’re joking, Father,” Draco said. He stated it experimentally. He tried a laugh. The laugh died in his throat. Still Father sat there and stared at him, and there was no sign of a joke in his cloudy, luminous eyes or otherworldly stare. Draco shook his head. “You must be joking—you can’t be—”

“I can’t be serious?” Father’s lips peeled back from his lips. Draco had never seen a werewolf, or he would have known the only other creatures in the world that smiled like that. “Whyever not? Who else is there for you to wed, Draco? Would you trust any woman you could find in the wider world to be a scion of the true, pure Dark?”

“You can’t—Mother wouldn’t have—”

“Your mother wished for nothing but that I wed someone as beautiful and pure as she was,” Father interrupted. “And in all the world, there is no one like that but you. My son.” He paused and then added, “She would have thought you honored.”

Draco found a small set of words that had been hiding at the bottom of his lungs. “I don’t want to.”

Father folded the napkin in front of him in small, precise squares, all the while looking Draco in the eye, holding that cold gaze. “I am afraid that what you _want_ no longer matters.”

Draco stood, shaking, with his hand on the back of the chair. He wanted to say that he would run away, that he would tear into the world with nothing but the clothes on his back and the wand in his hand if he had to.

But Father’s gaze put a stop to that as well. Because Father controlled the wards around the Manor, and he would shut Draco in if he had to. He controlled the dungeons, and he would make chains snap shut around Draco’s wrists if he had to. He controlled the house-elves, and he would make them cage Draco in his room and starve him to death until he agreed to the marriage.

If he had to.

Answering his thoughts, Father said simply, “I would prefer not to have to. You are very beautiful, Draco, with a shine that you do not see, because you have never had anyone else to compare it to. I would prefer not to mar your beauty by breaking something in you.”

“You would break my spirit,” Draco whispered.

Father’s face seemed to melt a little. But only seemed. “You will be very happy once you are married, darling. To me. You will see.”

Draco backed a step away, and another. Father only sat and watched him tolerantly. “Marriage is an adult thing,” he said, “and you are shedding the last of your childhood. I will wait until you are ready. For all that, our wedding date will not be distant. You will be surprised how fast the time flies by.”

Draco turned and hurried out of the room. He knew he couldn’t run. He knew he could do nothing but feel the walls closing in around him.

He knew it _must not be._

And he knew that it was.

*

Oddly, it didn’t take Draco long to decide what he was going to do. He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it when he was standing to confront his father in the dining room, but he was _glad_ he hadn’t. That meant there was no chance of Lucius reading it out of his mind or noticing a change in his behavior.

Draco packed carefully. He couldn’t take many clothes, or Lucius—not Father, never again—would suspect something. He took robes that he didn’t wear as often, that needed Warming or Preservation Charms put on them because they weren’t woven into the cloth like so many of the clothes he owned. And he took small preserved jars of food that the house-elves brought him. They thought it was just ordinary food, but Draco would preserve the biscuit or the bread or the cheese and tuck it into a jar that was also enchanted to hold all contents perfectly stable and unchanging.

He would have to find some place to land and ask for food when he ran out. The thought made him want to throw up. But not as much as marrying Lucius did, so he kept on.

And he kept the one thing most vital to his plan out of sight. There was no chance that he was going to let Lucius notice it and take it away. Let Lucius think for right now that Draco was just too depressed to do anything but hide in his room.

Draco waited.

And waited.

*

But he was still taken by surprise when he woke in the darkness one night and found a hand clamped over his mouth. He tried to scream, shaking and thrashing, but it didn’t work. Lucius bore down harder, his hand as cold as the wind that blew across their Quidditch pitch in the autumn, and then he groaned and climbed into bed with Draco.

He was naked, wearing only his swinging, shining hair.

Draco convulsed. His magic bled out through his skin and hurled the room into shadowy blue light. That froze Lucius in his position, his mouth gaping slightly.

Whether he was wary of Draco’s strength or simply didn’t like seeing what he was doing didn’t matter to Draco. He convulsed and shouted again, and finally managed to shove his father off the bed. He crawled into an opposite corner of the room and stood there, trembling, naked himself, with the blue light making the room look as if they stood under a full moon on a snowfield.

He knew he would never sleep naked again.

Lucius sat up next to the bed and gave him a long, stern, disappointed look. “This is the only way,” he said. “There is nothing else for you.”

Draco’s body shook with unaccustomed fury. Lucius stared at him, lips parted. If Draco could have seen from the outside how he looked then, with beauty illuminating his face even more than the magic, he might have understood his father’s fascination.

But he could not, and that was important. “And nothing else for _you_ ,” he hissed back, “except to _get out_.”

In the end, Lucius inclined his head and went. Draco waited until the door shut and he couldn’t hear footsteps in the corridor anymore, until the blue magic died from his skin and left him shaking like a star cast to earth.

Then he moved.

He couldn’t stay any longer. He couldn’t wait for the best moment. He snatched up the trunk with the robes he would be taking and the preserved jars of food, shrank it all, and took out his broom from the closet. When he climbed onto it, it shuddered a little beneath him, as if it sensed his desire to fly and shared his wish to never come back.

Draco opened his window and flew out.

He had done this so many times before that for a moment, as he watched his shadow skimming over the neatly-trimmed grass beneath him, he thought he could fly in circles for a while and then come back, and everything would be as it was before Mother had died. But then he saw the white shade of her tomb, and he shuddered and aimed the broom.

Straight up.

Lucius controlled the wards around the house and grounds and wouldn’t drop them for anything, but his control of them grew weaker the further up one went. Or at least that was what Draco was hoping, based on a faint memory of a time he had chased the Snitch too high when he was seven and received a tremendous scolding for “going beyond the wards.”

Draco had never known he had been. And he had never wanted to go beyond the wards before, into the world overrun with Muggles and with no safe sanctuaries left for magical people.

But now he rose.

The air grew thinner around him. The stars seemed to shine as clearly as the blue light that had come through his body. The moonlight was a shimmer on his skin. Draco shuddered and wished it was the sun. He had to bend over and grip the broom handle with hands gone almost numb.

He wished he’d thought to bring gloves. But this wasn’t something one could exactly _plan_ for.

Higher and higher, and then Draco couldn’t see the Manor below him anymore. He couldn’t see anything but a strange pattern of lines and circles. He had no idea what they were, and his head was spinning so much that it was hard to care.

He had to be beyond the wards. Not even Lucius’s paranoia could extend them this high.

_You hope._

But, in the end, it was the only hope he had. Draco turned his broom and began to fly straight. He didn’t know where he was going. He urged the broom on with knees and hips and hands, shivering uncontrollably in the robe he’d flung over himself. He wanted to find something. Someplace safe. He would know it when he found it.

He didn’t know how long he flew. He did know that he came to earth among tangled trees and a hum that _felt_ like magic. Draco rolled off his broom and stared up at the sky.

The sun was rising.

He was beyond the wards.

But he fell asleep before he could appreciate the fact.

*

Draco went walking through the calm, barren woods the next day, using a Warming Charm to make sure that he didn’t freeze.

The leaves that crunched underneath were years old. Draco was sure of that, even though he hadn’t been in any woods before to tell. There were no house-elves _here_ to rake up the leaves and make neat, tended beds out of the withered flowers.

That comforted him as it never would have before.

Draco did pause when he reached what suddenly seemed to be the edge of the woods, and felt the thrumming power before him. Had Lucius tracked him down already? He put his hand on his wand and prepared to sell his freedom. Being killed was better than being taken back to—that.

But the soft, dawn-like light in front of him was only the pearly early morning it seemed, Draco finally determined as he stepped into the open. There was a curve of lakeshore before him, and Draco stared in interest. He had only seen pictures of water lapping at earth before this.

When he could manage to tear his attention away from the water, he saw the ruins.

There had been a building far grander than the Manor here at one point, Draco finally thought, in a daze, when the sheer _size_ of the tumbled stones didn’t overwhelm his senses. He paced closer, and realized the shimmering magic came from the ruins themselves. There was a crumbled tower that _felt_ starry, as if someone had practiced magical Astronomy there once upon a time. And there were long scorch marks that indicated powerful wards had probably broken.

Draco couldn’t imagine the strength of the wizards who had lived in these towers—because surely it must be more than one, it must be at least a family like the Malfoys—and practiced their magic.

Then another thought struck him, and he shivered, if he had only known it, like the Astronomy Tower before it fell.

What about the strength of the wizards that had _felled_ this fortress?

Draco drew his wand and looked around himself. But nothing moved except the branches of the trees, and the lapping water of the lake—

And a shadow, right _behind_ him.

Draco spun around, but ended up staring instead of attacking. There was a tall, thin horse behind him, looking at him with blind white eyes. Its bat-like wings arched from its back, and now and then a black bone hoof scraped the ground. Draco swallowed and slowly lowered his wand. In response, the horse—the _thestral_ —stepped forwards and nibbled thoughtfully at his hair.

“I’m not good to eat,” Draco told it, even as he lifted his hand and stroked the thick, shining mane. “Can I see you because I saw you mother die?”

The thestral, plainly uninterested in such questions, abruptly turned away and cantered into the woods. Draco followed. Its presence comforted him, although he supposed there was no reason it had to. After all, some of the books had said that thestrals got tamed by wizards on a regular basis, and sometimes they even drew carriages or served as mounts. That meant there might still be other people around here somewhere.

People who could threaten him with—

Draco’s breath seized up, but he kept walking. The thestral certainly didn’t look as if it was about to slow down and wait for him.

 _He’s not here, he’s not here,_ Draco reminded himself again and again before he stepped into a clearing crowded with thestrals and forgot all about reassuring himself.

The thestrals were chewing on small, squirming, bloody shapes. Draco came slowly closer. None of them paid him enough attention to forsake their meal, although he got a few glances from bulging, blind-white eyes.

The wave of nausea he expected at the sight of beasts feasting on raw flesh didn’t come. Instead, it was a wave of intense _hunger_. Draco licked his lips and turned to walk into the forest. His trunk with the preserved food he’d brought wasn’t far away.

He didn’t get there. Instead, a small creature that looked like a weasel ran in front of him, chased by a galloping thestral foal with legs so skinny that it skidded and tumbled on the leaves to wave them helplessly in the air. Draco saw the weasel rattling towards the edge of the clearing, certain to get away.

He pointed his wand. “ _Avada Kedavra_ ,” he said clearly, and didn’t think of the many lessons where Lucius had worked on teaching him this.

The jet of green light hit the weasel, and it dropped. The thestral foal popped back up with a flap of its leathery wings, and turned to stare at him with its nostrils working. Draco stepped up to it. The foal was only as tall as his shoulder, much less intimidating than the full-grown members of the herd.

“Share?” he asked calmly.

The foal obviously didn’t understand, but when Draco used a Cutting Charm to slice the weasel in half, and floated the bloody hind end towards his hunting partner, the foal dropped his head and began to chew and swallow at once. Draco carried his half off towards a more distant clearing to find dry wood with which to build a fire.

*

He didn’t understand why he wanted raw meat—well, meat that had been cooked over a fire, but he’d _caught_ it raw—all of a sudden. What he knew was that he fit in with the thestrals in the Forest in a way he never had in Malfoy Manor.

As autumn turned into winter, that continued to be true. Draco cast Warming Charms, and built fires, and honestly was as comfortable most nights and mornings as he had been in the Manor with its frigid stone walls and floors. And he hunted. He helped the original foal he’d given the weasel to—who he called Ungainly—and others to improve their stalking and catching rate and their balance on the slick leaves, and to find alternate routes that wouldn’t take them through glades that crackled so with sound.

The adult thestrals either ignored him or began to nudge him with their noses when he appeared. None of them bit him beyond curious pulls at his hair and earlobes, and those mostly from the foals. Draco spent hours sitting among the herd, watching them, or walking after them through the forest and watching how they found other things to eat, too: hidden berries, strips of bark that Draco could also peel off and chew, fat grubs that squirmed disgustingly but were full of crunch and spark once Draco closed his eyes to eat them.

And there came one day when an adult, Ungainly’s mother, Moonshadow, came prancing up to him and lay down and stared at him until Draco hesitantly threw a leg over her back. Moonshadow promptly cantered forwards and spread her wings, then leaped as they came into one of the open areas lightning had left in the forest.

Draco gasped. He had flown so many times on his broom, but this was _nothing_ like that. The movement of air around his face, the surge of muscles underneath him, the slightly chill feeling of Moonshadow’s skin…he sank his hands into the folds of cold around her neck, and laughed aloud as they circled over the unbroken canopy of green.

Other than the ruins and a small trailing of young trees that might have meant a road used to be there, there was no sign of human habitation in sight.

Draco hid his smile against Moonshadow’s neck.


	2. Chapter 2

After a long winter of comfort and an early spring of wandering and freedom, of course Draco’s comfort was rudely splintered one afternoon when he heard someone whooping and shouting near the ruins.

Draco walked slowly towards the edge of the forest. He still carried his wand with him, although now he used it for hunting more than anything else. But he knew enough curses to defend himself if it came to that.

He wondered for a moment why someone had come to the ruins after leaving them alone for seasons, but the minute he saw this person, he knew. This was the first really warm and sunny afternoon of spring, with a light breeze to put up a little resistance.

Perfect for broom-flying.

Draco gaped as he watched the boy who rode above the ruins. Well, “boy.” He was really a teenager probably the same age as himself, but Draco didn’t feel young anymore considering what he’d gone through. And he doubted this boy had ever been almost—by his father or spent even a moment clad in the shed, gifted skin of a thestral, let alone a winter.

Still, he had an undeniable grace on a broom. Draco watched as he doubled back on himself so fast that it looked as if he were trying to catch his own bristles, rose to a height Draco had attained only when he escaped the wards and dived back down, twisted around in a perfect Wronski Feint and caught an imaginary Snitch, and laughed and laughed.

When he came slanting down to land on the lakeshore and collapse, panting, Draco could see him better. Hair as dark as a thestral’s coat, his skin bearing a fading tan.

The boy rolled over and sat up, and Draco gasped aloud. Eyes as green as the grass in the Manor’s gardens—no, as green as the new leaves unfolding on the trees—no, more than that, as green as—as _life_ —

The boy gasped back, and Draco realized abruptly that this stranger could _see_ him. He immediately retreated, and felt Moonshadow press up behind him. Draco looped an arm around her withers and let her lead him away.

Thrashing and the breaking of branches erupted behind him, the boy calling, “Please! I won’t hurt you! I’m just—I never saw anyone near the ruins of Hogwarts before! Come back!”

 _The ruins of Hogwarts._ Now Draco knew why the castle site shimmered so with expended magic, and why the building had been so big. He shook his head. He wouldn’t abandon the forest that had become his home, but he wouldn’t be venturing back into civilization, either. Not near the place of the last magical battle between Dumbledore and the Dark Lord.

The boy continued trying to follow and call to him, but his voice was hidden by the curtain of branches, the soft and steady noise of hooves beside Draco, the cool exhales of carrion-scented breath in his face as Moonshadow stopped to nuzzle him.

_No. I’ve found where I belonged._

*

Draco was riding Moonshadow above the woods when he saw the boy again.

Suddenly there was a broom beside him, and the boy sat there, crouched over the handle, staring straight ahead over the bristles. Draco froze for a second and nearly pulled Moonshadow back to the safety of the woods, but the boy didn’t turn to look at him. He seemed utterly content to fly on beside them, gaze fixed on the distant horizon.

Draco relaxed muscle by muscle. The afternoon was lazy, late, golden, sunny. The other thestrals had wandered away to bathe in a shallow pool, but Moonshadow had wanted to fly, and Draco couldn’t see much reason to change his plans just because there was another human being around.

It was even sort of _nice_ to have another human nearby. One who didn’t want to—

Draco cut the thought off, and sneaked a glance at the boy. The boy never did the same. He really did seem to see only the horizon, to have hypnotized or seduced himself into never looking at anything but it.

And Moonshadow wasn’t spooked, either, which Draco thought interesting. He had to wonder now if perhaps the boy had spent time near the woods and the ruins of Hogwarts before, and that had somewhat accustomed the thestrals to human presence. Draco probably couldn’t have expected to find them so friendly otherwise.

That would mean he _owed_ something to this stranger. Draco’s whole being revolted against it.

But they never spoke, not that afternoon, and when the boy finally broke away from them and swooped towards some other destination, Draco was able to go back to the main herd and sleep with an untroubled heart.

*

The next morning, the boy was sitting off to the side of the clearing and feeding Ungainly and another foal, whom Draco called Rustle from the noise he made crunching through the leaves, from a basket. The scent of the meat made even Draco’s nostrils twitch. It smelled like cooked chicken.

The boy didn’t look at him. Draco took a few hesitant steps towards him. The boy then put some of the meat on a plate, along with sliced strawberries and some melon that was more golden than the sunlight, and put it on the ground. When Ungainly tried to sneak forwards to grab some of the chicken, the boy prevented him.

Draco edged up, snatched the plate, and ran away to the side of the clearing with it, shaking a little with how daring he felt, and how much like a thestral striving to trust someone.

But when he glanced over his shoulder, the boy was smiling. “I’m Harry Potter,” was all he said, and then he picked up his basket, dumped out the rest of the chicken on the ground for Ungainly and the other foals, and went his way.

The fresh fruit tasted even better than Draco had thought it would, and satisfied a part of his hunger he hadn’t known was there. He spent the rest of that afternoon waiting, without acknowledging it, for Harry to come back.

*

Draco sat silently next to Harry, listening to him play a flute that looked like it was made of bone. But if it was bone, then it shone softly silvery in the sunlight, and made a hollow noise that reminded Draco of wind blowing through caves.

Or the way that wind blowing through caves was described in books, anyway. It reminded Draco again, hard, of how little he’d experienced outside the walls of the garden.

The song ended. Harry put the flute on his knee and leaned against the trunk of the tree behind them, staring into the distance. Draco shifted. He hadn’t wanted to talk before this, but now he wanted to know things: where Harry actually came from, what kind of bone the flute was made of, why he kept coming here.

“What kind of bone is that?”

Harry glanced at him with a small smile. “Wyvern. A lot of them have come back to Britain since the wild magic was unleashed. It’s easier to kill the young ones, but the old ones are pretty bold, too.”

“Wild magic?” Draco hated the small words that popped out of his mouth. They sounded pathetic. But Harry just nodded as if he could accept them and looked back into the distance, towards the burgeoning leaves of the trees.

“When Voldemort and Dumbledore fought,” Harry whispered, “they called up all the Dark and Light magic they could against each other. But there was another power here, one that the Founders of Hogwarts wove into the foundations of the school as protection against anything ever destroying it. Wild magic. It rose, and it met the Light and the Dark, and it…exploded. There’s not very many Muggles left in Britain anymore, either. They can’t fire their guns. They can’t run their machines. The wild magic won’t let them.”

Draco disregarded the fact that he didn’t know what guns were, and only had a vague idea on machines. There were more important things. “How do you know that?”

Harry blinked at him, then glanced aside. He never seemed to want to look at Draco too directly, in case he sent him fleeing back into the forest. “My mother and father used to be soldiers for Dumbledore. They were at a distance enough to survive when the wild magic exploded, but they didn’t know what happened at first. My mother is a Charms expert. She’s researched for years to figure out what the difference is in magic between when they went to school and now.”

Draco shivered. It sounded—strange. “Then your parents are Light wizards?”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Where did you grow up, that you make that distinction?” Draco immediately shifted and started to withdraw, and Harry softened and reached out to grab his hand. “No, never mind. It doesn’t matter. There’s no more Light or Dark magic, Draco. There’s only wild power. You can do spells that have a very focused end result, and you can do magic that doesn’t rely on spells, like flying a broom. Some humans are also learning to harness their innate will to do certain things, like the magical creatures can. But that’s all.”

“That can’t be true. I’ve cast curses. And seen them cast.”

Harry shrugged. “If you have powerful wards up and they were cast prior to the war, then you can do Light or Dark magic in a protected area. But my parents have never been interested in hiding like that. So I wasn’t raised that way.”

Draco closed his eyes. To him, it was so utterly strange to think that he might have grown up _hiding_ from the world instead of holding it at bay that it made his skin prickle as if someone was poking him with dozens of needles.

But it also eased a fear he hadn’t known was still there. He was _free_. He didn’t have to go back to Lucius’s house to survive as a human being, if he ever wanted to leave the company of the thestrals. He didn’t have to marry the man who had tried to—hurt him. There were more options.

Harry made a soft sound beside him. Draco opened his eyes and turned his head.

Harry was gazing at him from a short distance away, and his eyes were wide and there was a play of shimmering light in them that made Draco tense instinctively, even though his own breathing remained calm and relaxed.

“I know one thing about the place you grew up,” Harry whispered, and his voice was so soft and wondering that Draco didn’t take fright or offense. “It must have been lonely.”

“Why do you say that?” Draco whispered back. There was no noise louder than Moonshadow’s hooves as she shifted behind a tree, and stamped her way into the soft soil.

“Because your eyes are so haunted,” Harry said softly, and lifted a hand and brushed it timidly down the sleek side of Draco’s head. Draco couldn’t even feel the touch of his individual fingertips. “I sometimes see something similar in my parents’ eyes when they speak of the world before the war, and the friends they lost. But it’s only similar. They had something else, and they lost it. You’ve—never known anything else. You grew up with that loneliness.”

Draco sat there, his lips parted, staring openly at the boy who had named things he hadn’t known about himself. Harry leaned closer, his eyes fluttering a little.

And Draco knew what he wanted, and the terror that flooded him was blacker than a thestral’s skin. He stumbled to his feet and ran into the forest, aiming away from the tree and Harry, even though Harry called for him to come back.

He ran until he was surrounded by the shifting shadows of the herd, and then he wept soundless tears with his face pressed into Moonshadow’s hide.

No, he wasn’t going to experience _that_ again.

And if Harry’s loss felt acuter than the loss of his beloved father, a strike like a unicorn’s horn between his ribs—Draco needn’t speak of that, and thestrals could keep a secret.

*

“Draco?”

Draco immediately twisted to his feet, his hand shooting out. His wand was there before he could call for it, and he _did_ open his mouth then, to shout, to scream, to chase away the ghost of Lucius that hung around him—

“It’s just me.”

A soft flicker of light traveled through the trees. Draco stared. Harry was sitting at one side of the clearing, his body cradled between three of the great tree-roots in a place that Draco had often spent his time sitting, too. His hand was outstretched, and a ball of softly glowing green light floated above his palm.

“How are you doing that?” Draco whispered without voice.

Harry seemed to hear him, though. He shook his head. “Magic is what you’re used to now,” he said. “That’s probably why your wand works for you. My parents taught me wild magic. That comes more easily to me.”

“Wild magic?”

“Will. And power.” Harry grinned and squeezed his fingers, waggling them. The green light floated back and forth in obedient circles. “My particular talent is light-based spells. I can call fire a lot more easily than water.”

“And how did you find me?”

Harry cleared his throat, looking a little embarrassed, and touched his glasses. “At night, I can see the heat that bodies give off. The thestrals don’t give off much. I just had to look for the glowing human shape.”

Draco closed his eyes, tired of fighting, and put his wand away. He sat down. Ungainly snorted at him and flicked his tail out of the way. Apparently, Draco had been about to sit on it. “Why did you come to find me?”

“Because I wanted to apologize for what it seems I’ve done.” When Draco glanced up again, Harry’s face was averted and he was staring into the distance. “I set you off somehow. Brought up bad memories. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“The bad memories are nothing you can _help_. You didn’t cause them.”

“I know. But I still wanted to say I’m sorry.”

That baffled Draco a bit, the notion of anyone apologizing for what they’d done. Of course, he knew what it was, since the house-elves had, but neither Lucius nor Mother would ever have done it. He honestly hadn’t thought they were words that humans used.

He studied Harry in the glowing green light. Harry kept looking away, as if he knew how uncomfortable Draco would be if he studied him directly.

That was another new concept—someone understanding his discomfort, and trying to _help_ him with it.

When Draco spoke, it was in a whisper. “My magic’s let me survive winter with the thestrals. I don’t _need_ to spend time around humans again.”

“I know.”

“Your parents might hate me.”

Harry’s muscles tensed, but he seemed to notice the emphasis Draco placed on the word “might.” He nodded. “I know.”

“You have no idea what happened to me.”

“I know.”

Draco found himself drifting, at a loss. “And you still want me to come with you and meet your parents?” He found the strength to say the next words by looking elsewhere instead of right at Harry. “And you want to—kiss me?”

“Oh, yes.”

Harry’s voice was vast and soft and deep and nothing like the horrible words Lucius had uttered when he came into the bedroom. Draco swallowed and tried to ignore the sense of an equally vast and soft pit opening beneath his feet.

Then he said, “I need time.”

Harry nodded and stood up. He drew something from his robe pocket that made Draco tense, but it wasn’t a wand. He only said, “For you,” and dropped it on the ground, then turned and walked out of the clearing without looking back.

Draco picked it up. It was a silver bracelet in the shape of what Draco thought was a serpent at first, and then he recognized the curving, long neck, and the gaping, fanged mouth, and even the wings that streamed over its back to form the delicate, embracing curves of the bracelet.

It was a thestral, with diamonds for eyes.

*

When Harry came back after drifting grey afternoons and others when Draco had soared above the forest with Moonshadow and risen high enough to see the sun, Draco had thought and thought, and still not made up his mind.

Harry merely sat next to him, watching the leaves open on the trees above them. Some were fully open by now, but more trees than Draco had thought at first still needed to finish unfolding them. Harry’s hand rested on his and stroked in gentle motions as he lay there.

Draco found himself staring, since Harry’s eyes were half-closed. He looked so different from the monster that Draco had begun to envision Lucius as. He was pale, but that was the only similarity.

And Draco wondered if he would rather spend the rest of his life _afraid_ of waking from nightmares of what Lucius had wanted to do, or if he would rather take a chance and perhaps wake up beside someone who wouldn’t mind, who would try to help him heal the damage caused by those nightmares.

“What is it?”

Harry’s eyes were open, and although his voice was sleepy, he was watching Draco. Draco took his heart in both hands, and decided to offer it.

“This,” he said, and bent down to kiss Harry.

Harry had good instincts. He didn’t reach up and try to touch Draco. In fact, he kept his hands exactly where they were, one folded beneath his head and the other stroking Draco’s, slowing only a little as their lips brushed. When Draco leaned back, panting as if he’d fallen off a flying thestral, Harry smiled.

“That’s the beginning of a choice.”

“It _is_ the choice,” Draco said. He was thinking—had been thinking for so long, but now one set of thoughts seemed stronger than the others. “I’d like to sleep in a bed again, you know. What I needed was…what I needed then. It doesn’t mean that I’ll need it for the rest of my life, that I can never get better.”

Harry’s smile was brighter than the light he could call with his magic. “Then you’ll come with me to see home?” He still kept his hands motionless except for the gentle strokes his thumb placed on the back of Draco’s. “To meet my parents?”

“Of course I will.”

Draco could see it, now. The lighted path stretching ahead, the path that he had never thought he would walk. He’d needed this interlude in the forest and the thestrals and the skin draped loosely over his shoulders. He’d never thought he would come out.

But perhaps he’d even needed the conviction that he’d fled human society forever. It wasn’t like he’d known there was any human society to _join_.

Harry stood up, and the leaves from last year crackled around him. Draco stood up, too, following the pull of his hands, and Moonshadow strode up behind him to put her chin on his shoulder.

“I’ll always come back and visit,” Draco told her softly, running his hands through her mane.

Harry laughed as Moonshadow glared and then turned and led them towards the edge of the forest. “I think she wants to come with us.”

In the end, three thestrals did: Moonshadow, Ungainly, and a stallion that Draco hadn’t bothered to name because they barely paid attention to each other. But as he flung his leg over Moonshadow’s back, he thought Greywild might be a fine name.

_Enough to start our own little herd of thestrals._

Harry caught his hand again as they rose into the air, and Draco looked at him with contentment. They were starting other things, too.

And as they soared above the ruins of Hogwarts and towards the future that Draco hadn’t thought existed, he drew the thestral skin close about him and leaned against Harry’s warmth.

**The End.**


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